Path to Publication: Day 7

Today I had the full day to myself and wanted to get a lot of things done. In reality it consisted of a lot of reading.

Things I did

Make a printed copy for self edits

Editing every day is super important.

For myself, I edit the full printed copy and then go through the computer document and make those changes.

An important tip, if you are adding a comma or something small like that, make a circle around that edit so you don’t miss it when transferring these edits to the document. A printed copy is only helpful if those edits actually make it to the master copy.

Research Professional editors

My church has a FB page and I posted a comment if anyone does professional editing for a living. That is where I found my editor. She gave me a great discount, which helped my budget considerably.

If this isn’t an option for you then I would suggest the FB page 20booksTo50k, there are literally dozens of well qualified editors with fees with a large range. Also in many cases you can strike up a conversation with the actual editor to know what type of editing would be best for you.

Read Smashwords Style Guide for formatting

Previously I downloaded the Smashwords style guide and today I set of goal to reading it in one sitting. After just over an hour I was halfway through the book. Great, but I was majorly losing focus. So I allowed myself to do something fun for an hour and then returned to reading. The second half went faster than the first half thankfully.

By pre-reading this guide, I learned that it will certainly take me a full day to format my book when I am ready to do so. I will most likely pick a weekend where my husband can follow these steps with me to help me troubleshoot should it become necessary. I am NOT tech savvy and having another set of eyes seeing what I’m doing will be extremely helpful. Of course, I’ll let you know how that goes when that day comes.